~ by GroPartners Consulting CEO Greg French

Is controlling your brand messaging a little like herding cats?

How do you ensure that the voice of your brand speaks consistently across media channels and stakeholder groups, transcends changes in leadership, and keeps your sales force from wandering off the reservation…so to speak?

Messaging governance is an essential component of any well-structured brand governance system (see our blogpost “Brand Governance — what’s all the buzz?). Simply put, governing your messaging means establishing practices and procedures to ensure all your organization’s communications stay on point. So what would such a system consist of, exactly?

First, you need a process for creating and managing a messaging platform. Ideally, a process-driven approach with task-specific technology would make it easier to develop, validate and track messaging for every key stakeholder group—both internal and external.

You’ll also want to monitor ongoing shifts in market conditions, composition or sentiment that may trigger a need to refresh, add or change messaging.

The proper care and feeding of your messaging platform requires someone in your organization, maybe even a team, to ensure ongoing administration and enforcement of messaging governance – a shepherd who can keep all those cats (or sales guys) aligned.

When there is a formal corporate messaging platform owned by the brand and not by a single person or department, the likelihood of coherent brand messaging succession increases significantly. That translates to stronger, more consistent brand loyalty – and that’s what messaging governance is all about.

Using the latest messaging technology can make message creation, organization, consistency and access much more manageable for everyone involved. And it helps to operationalize and elevate messaging to its proper place – transcending departmental boundaries, and even surviving changes in management – all in the effort to increase or preserve brand equity.

Next time you’re feeling like you’re alone on the range, in search of a brilliant way to share the right messaging with the team… know that you’re not alone. There’s a wrangler on the horizon, with the technology to help you reign in the right message. Check out 9align Message Mapper (9align.com) for a glimpse of technology specifically geared for messaging governance.